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Tencent Holdings Moves into Indonesian Social Media Market

China's biggest online gaming and social network company, Tencent Holdings (News - Alert), today made another major move toward progressing its Indonesia expansion program, setting up a joint venture with the country's biggest media group PT Global Mediacom. As Indonesia's social media market is on the rise — Indonesians are among the world's biggest users of Facebook and Twitter (News - Alert) — and Tencent is looking to capitalize on this.

"The partnership between Tencent and MNC is our strategic step to expand our reach to Indonesian customers," said Martin Lau, Tencent's president said in a statement.

Meanwhile, one of China's largest investment funds, Hillhouse Capital, is also participating in the venture, which will promote WeChat, Tencent's popular mobile chatting app. WeChat was first introduced in Indonesia in October last year, while other products from the company will be introduced in the near future. With the media power PT Global Mediacom has at its disposal, it's likely that Tencent's brand visibility will increase significantly in the country.

Marlin DRM is an open standard for digital rights management that was founded by Intertrust and a group of major consumer electronics companies in 2005.

More recently, Tencent began the process of wholly acquiring Juesheng New Education Group for an undisclosed sum, according to a person close to the situation. This marks Tencent's second strategic expansion into the online education industry after its investment in chuanke.com, which would see the website integrated with Tencent's QQ platform.

Businesses of the Juesheng New Education Group include juesheng.com, Juesheng New Education College and a China education service center for study abroad and training.